How To Break All The Rules And Get Away With It

How To Break All The Rules And Get Away With It

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Yahoo! recently released their style guide which contains incredibly valuable information on writing for the web. It touches on several topics including the importance of writing a style guide for your own website and personal brand. After reading this I realized that our office needed to have some sort of style guide that details our naming conventions and word choices as well.

The necessity of creating a style guide for your personal brand is primarily in creating consistency for the customer or reader. As busy as we all are, it can be difficult to remember all of the rules and conventions that we want to keep consistent throughout our writing and ad copy. Like all aspects of personal brand building, creating a personal style guide should be more than just a list of grammar rules and file naming conventions. Your personal style guide should contain information that you use to differentiate your brand and show your own style. You want a unique business card, website and catch phrase so why not a consistently unique style? One good example of this is Apple's i-naming conventions (ie. iPhone, iPad, etc.) These are clearly Apple words. All of them follow the same stylistic rules but they are uniquely Apple's stylistic rules. You need to come up with conceptually similar unique word phrases and styles for your personal brand.

Aside from the branding aspect of creating your own style you need to be sure that you are including keywords and key phrases in your style guide. Having a list of designated keywords to use will help your search engine optimization efforts. If you are using two different keywords to describe the same thing your search results for both of those words would be lower than your search results for optimizing just one of the words. For instance if you have a blog about meat and you write several blogs about hamburger and several blogs about ground beef the search results for each of these keywords may put your blog further back on the list of search results. However, if part of your style guide states that you will be optimizing for the word ground beef, your search results for ground beef may be higher than they would have if you used both words.

One of our most debated word conventions in our office is whether or not to use an "e" in electronic words such as email, e-store, e-commerce, etc. The politically correct way is to use a hyphen with anything but the word, email, because email has been proclaimed a word. We chose to modify this politically correct rule for our brand's purposes. I researched the different spellings of e-words using Google's keyword tool to find which e-word versions were the most searched for. The results were astounding. More than 12 times as many people were searching for e-words without a hyphen as opposed to e-words with a hyphen. Although the hyphenated version is politically correct, ultimately we need to optimize our websites and content for what people are actually searching for. Therefore, we made the decision to change our e-word style to words without a hyphen (ie. estore) After making this decision, we implemented it in our company-wide style guide and now it is simply a matter of following our company word choice conventions rather than debating amongst ourselves as to which is the proper usage.

On a slightly more technical note, another style choice that we made was in regard to our file naming conventions. Our content folders and files now all follow the same naming convention. This makes it easy to tell which files and folders are the most recent and up-to-date versions because of the naming rules that we have in place. For instance, we specify in the file name that the file is only a draft. This makes it easy for our content distributors to keep track of which content is ready to post and which needs to be finalized before posting.

The level of detail in the style guide is very important. If you cannot sit down face to face with someone they need to be able to read the style guide and determine how to use the naming conventions, word choice conventions, etc. I include examples of each rule in our style guide to clarify any confusion surrounding the rule. It is also a good idea to have someone who is unfamiliar with the practice read the instructions to determine whether or not they make sense. If a step-by-step list is appropriate, use that format of instruction but remember to include an example.

Creating and following a brand-wide style guide will help your brand maintain uniqueness, distinction, consistency and professionalism. You may find a need to change certain rules in your style guide later on. Share your unique style rules in the comments below!

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The original post can be found at http://www.mymark.com/blog/blog/2010/07/21/how-to-break-all-the-rules-and-get-away-with-it/



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